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I’ve been here so long I should call it home, though I hate it here. Except when I don’t care.

My days have become a tangled mess of sleeping, introspection, procrastinating, avoidance, talking to my father on the phone, and taking care of Internet tasks that alternately make me sad and really very angry. My insides are being wound up to breaking point.

Last month was a blog washout because of where I was.

This month might be a blog washout because of where I need to go.

My May Jonathan Cainer horoscope says it all: “You can fix the one source of trouble that’s more daunting than all the rest. Focus on it. Don’t be distracted. Once that is sorted out (as it WILL be!) all else will fall into place.” It’s like he read my mind. I know what I have to do, and it’s time I actually did it.

Stick with me, though. I *will* be back, but it might be June. (Then again, it might turn out that I get really chatty during May. 😉 Look up, look waaaaay up.)

Down. Got a call about the job I’d interviewed for, saying that the job orders had all been cancelled due to a hiring freeze.

Up. Got an unexpected call from my Mom to cheer me up shortly after that.

Down. Got hit with a $42.50 NSF charge by my bank for a $0.50 overage. Let’s not forget there’s going to be an equal fee on the other end of the NSF that I’ll also have to pay for. All for fifty cents. What a good thing I make all that dough on EI. (Yes, it’s my fault for not paying attention but it doesn’t make it more fun or any less stupid an overcharge.)

Up. A friend is going to drive me to the bank to deposit the cash I have on hand tomorrow so that I can reissue the payment that bounced and pay for their NSF charge.

Down. I now have no money for anything until next week. Major downer.

Up. Got an unexpected and uplifting email from a former co-worker this afternoon.

Down. Carpal tunnel is acting up in right hand and I don’t have a brace for it.

Up. Got a heads-up about a volunteer webmaster gig. Change is as good as a rest so it might be a nice to keep busy doing something a little different from my usual webmastering stuff. I think I’m probably insane, but it’s a good insane.

Let. me. off.

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Hair driving me nuts. Finally had to put it back in the hair band, which defeats the purpose of the new haircut. Having an emotional roller coaster of a day, all over the map. That was reflected in the fact that I pretty much slipped back into old eating habits. Didn’t eat quite as much as I probably would ordinarily, but it was all the wrong stuff — chocolate, Pringles, Pizza Pockets — and I feel ill for having eaten it. It’s certainly not helping the mood swings.

Need a break from my computer. Spending too much time online: surfing, reading, arguing, buying. Losing huge amounts of time and energy to it all, not to mention money that I don’t really have.

I watched a little bit of Dr. Phil today while waiting for something else to come on. It was about kids throwing tantrums — not really something I’m overly concerned about, you understand. One of the kids was filmed continually hitting himself in the face during his tantrum. Dr. Phil took a moment to point that, statistically, there were bound to be cutters in the audience and that cutting (like the hitting shown in the video) allows people to distract themselves from intense emotional/mental pain by inflicting a more easily handled physical pain.

I’m not a cutter but it wouldn’t have taken much to make me one. When I first moved here, I stood on one of the downtown bridges, waiting for a bus, trying not to burst into tears as waves of despair pulsed through me. I don’t remember what triggered that particular event — I was full into a new clinical depression relapse and it really didn’t take much to tip me over the edge — I just remember digging into the back of my hand with my keys, trying to cause a physical wound painful enough to take my mind off the pain in my soul. It eventually worked. I didn’t break the skin — I never do — but the welts were still visible by the time I got home and my roommate was horrified. It wasn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last, though it’s much more infrequent now than it used to be. You don’t always have the leisure to indulge your emotions — bursting into tears on the bus or in a meeting is generally a bad idea; if inflicting pain gets you through it long enough for you to get home, then that’s a Good Thing. But there’s a terrible stigma attached to the chronic use of physical pain to cope with your emotions.

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It’s seems to be something common to most of my friends, this ability to take teasing too far. I’m probably guilty of it myself. What can tip you over the knife edge from being amused even as the butt of the joke to being pissed off is almost random. Doesn’t take much. Just one comment too many on a day when your reservoir is already overflowing.

Today I am tired and I have no reservoir at all, let alone an overflowing one.

*sigh*

I also have a low tolerance for the crap that comes from borrowing or asking a favour from someone. I hate asking someone to do something for me, especially when they’ve made an open-ended offer. As an example, a good friend of mine used to tell me that she would drive me wherever I needed to go but the few times I asked, she either was unable to or stalled so long that I went on my own anyway. After that, I stopped asking. Walking home from the supermarket, laiden like a pack animal, was better than how I felt when I even thought of asking for her help again. However well-intended the offer is, eventually it becomes something that makes me feel like a pariah any time I attempt to take them up on the offer. And it only takes one or two incidents of feeling like that before I start avoiding the offer completely.

I’ve been accused of being a control freak, and sometimes I am. Most times, though, I’m just trying to avoid that roiling in the pit of my stomach that flares up whenever I have to ask for something that I suspect is inconvenient (which almost everything either is or becomes). I can’t find the right word for it but in my head, the vision that accompanies this feeling is one of a slave asking their master for something, knowing that they likely will be beaten instead. It’s a combination of hope, dread, obligation, shame, anxiety, and reluctance, and it manifests as a leaden ball in the solar plexus.

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Anxiety hits me in the solar plexus, which makes both my stomach and my chest unhappy. If they were people, they’d be pacing back and forth, wringing their hands, and muttering to themselves.

Project anxieties, as always. I’m getting crabby again. I’ve had it shoved down my throat repeatedly that the BA will be doing the technical/peer review of my documentation for the project—at project meetings, at department meetings, and in casual conversation it’s been stated and restated that the BA is responsible for doing the technical desk check (wtf?), the peer review/proofreading (huh?), and a business requirements check (I’ll grant you that one). But according to the PM, everyone (meaning the BA) is too busy to do a peer review on the project that is due this week. She’s had it for several weeks and hasn’t managed to squeeze in a couple of hours to look it over yet? Then why the f&^% did you insist that she be the one to do it, for crissakes?!

What burns me most about that is that I’ve been told that under no circumstances am I to ask for my colleague to do a peer review for me without the express permission of the project manager responsible for the project she’s currently working on and the project wanting the peer review. And that is never going to happen. I can’t get them to understand that it isn’t a project thing, it’s a technical writing team thing. Do programmers have to get permission before they can ask another programmer to check something over for them? It’s called team work. The whole thing just makes me annoyed, anxious, stressed, ill, and unhappy. I spent several hours tonight working on the damn thing and I’ll probably end up putting in hours on the weekend as well. I have insomnia again and I’m near tears all the time. I need to find a way to cope with this because whatever I’m doing now just isn’t working.

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Been AWOL for a bit. Losing time faster. Feeling anger starting to build like I was feeling late last year. Need to get a grip on myself.

Cainer’s forecase for yesterday:

There’s definitely a stick. It clearly has two ends. There’s no question that you have hold of one of these ends. But which is the right end, and which is the wrong end. Understandably enough, you want to feel that you’ve aligned yourself correctly. Someone else, though, sees the same situation from the opposite viewpoint. You can’t both be right, can you? As the recent influence between Venus and Neptune now begins to fade, you are seeing a familiar situation in a different light. There’s no shame in changing your mind.

And today:

Minds were made for changing. The only people who form an opinion and then maintain it for the rest of their lives without ever questioning it again, are bigots or idiots. Strangely, though, we often feel a little ashamed about confessing that we have come to see a situation differently. We should, though, feel proud that we have developed enough wisdom to outgrow a previous position. Although, if we are truly wise, we will not be proud, just quietly humble! Embrace a new perspective this weekend.

Dammit!

Lots of lightning out there tonight. No thunder yet, which is weird. Must be really far away.

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Almost yelled (well, maybe “almost” isn’t accurate…I think I did yell) at one of the project managers at work when he started interrogating me about a release that I’d only just learned about a day or so previously. Everything is due the first week of June. It’s the second week of April. It’s an update release. Chillax.

I had sent the French version of the document out for a full edit in February — it was a mishmash of the work of several different translators and translator-wannabes and it would be nice to get it consistent with the English — and it’s due back at the end of April. The PM freaked out over that. April 30 was the original due date but the transation office thought it might come back earlier. Turns out she was wrong; they’re swamped by year-end crap from other offices. Regardless, end of April is not a huge deal. Doesn’t stop me writing the English stuff. And there isn’t likely to be 4 weeks worth of new French stuff to send out for translation. So he’s getting upset over nothing. But he stills wants a detailed timeframe for everything and doesn’t understand that I can’t tell him what I don’t know. Translation time is based on word count and I won’t know the word count until I’ve actually written it, which I can’t do until they stop dickering over the details of the planned changes. And I don’t know how much work the stuff that is currently being edited will be when it comes back — it may just be a day or two of copying, pasting, and checking or it may be a week or more; it depends on just how bad the original really was. When I sent it out, there was no June release on the horizon (in fact, we’d just sent one out). There are other sources of crankiness on that particular project that didn’t help raise my mood, though I shouldn’t let them bother me. (Note to self: there’s a good lesson to learn. Think “Serenity Prayer”.)

So he got cranky and I got crankier. That never ends well, for me at least. That was shortly before I left work and part of the reason why I wasn’t into a suitable mood for the psychic fair. And part of why I am stressed out now (oh, there are so many reasons for me to be stressed out right now and almost all of them my own damned fault).

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Or so they say. In my past, that has been true. Not sure about now but things seem to be coming to me that are helpful to me.

The ESP Psychic Fair is this weekend. I had planned to attend yesterday on my way home from work but it didn’t open until 4pm — by 3pm, I was descending into a full-on hormonal mood swing (close to a crying jag); didn’t think it was an appropriate energy to bring to a psychic fair, especially when there isn’t really anything in particular I wanted other than to spend money buying more stuff I don’t really need. So, didn’t go. I may yet go — depends on my mood tomorrow — but right now, the chances are slim.

But I’ve been on another book-buying spree. This time, the urge was for spiritual books and CDs. Have lots of food for the spirit, as it were, including new books by my favourite animal psychic, Amelia Kinkade, and one of my favourite mediums, Allison Dubois (she of Medium fame). But the book I was most looking forward to getting arrived yesterday from Amazon.co.uk. It’s by another of my favourite mediums, David Wells, who appears on the British TV show Most Haunted. He’s a very likable person so I quite enjoy watching him on the show. If I were going to be a psychic, he’s the kind of psychic I’d want to be: human, with human frailties but confident of his knowledge.

Anyway, the book is called “David Wells’ Complete Guide to Developing Your Psychic Skills”. I know, it’s a hokey title. Try to get past that. I’ve only read a couple of chapters but I’m really liking his approach. It’s very down-to-earth and it resonates more with me than some similar books. I’d been avoiding buying it for awhile, for a number of reasons that I don’t want to go into here. But now seemed a good time. And I’m glad I did.

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My moods are cycling something fierce today. Should probably check the calendar to see if it’s PMS at fault or just the usual insanity. Doesn’t help that my usual Sunday night insomnia was exacerbated by a very overactive brain. One of the drawbacks to keying your memories to music is that the music tends to keep playing in your head long after you’ve shut it off—after I’d finally managed to fall asleep at around 2:30am, I found myself waking up every 1/2 hour or so with a head full of music and thoughts. I’d also left one of my monitors powered up and the glow from the background picture was picking at my eyeballs all night. Have a headache but my brain hasn’t showed sign of shutting off tonight.

Was perky today (my MP3 player arrived—it’s niiiiiiiice—and I even got an Xmas care package from my folks) but I starting spiralling down quickly after work and bottomed out a few minutes ago, ending with a little crying jag. My solar plexus is vibrating like a drum and I’m barely holding off a minor but fully-fledged and completely unfocussed panic attack.